Personal mobile communication/computing devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and two-way pagers, can be referred to collectively as “mobile devices” or “wireless devices”. The current state-of-the-art of mobile devices has advanced far beyond that of their predecessors. For example, early cellular telephones used analog signals to communicate over wireless telecommunications networks (or simply “wireless networks”) and were nothing more than mobile telephones. Today's most advanced cellular telephones are all digital and provide many other functions in addition to telephony capability. For example, many of the latest generation of mobile telephones (and other mobile devices) allow their users to play games, access World Wide Web pages, exchange email, exchange and download files, exchange short messaging service (SMS) messages, and send and receive video.
With new mobile devices providing a wider range of capabilities, there is increasing demand among the users of these devices (i.e., wireless services subscribers) for new and interesting types of digital content that can be used on these mobile devices, such as games and other applications, images, ring tones, screensavers, wallpapers, etc. Although newer mobile devices often come pre-provisioned with certain digital products when first acquired by the subscriber, it is desirable to allow subscribers to acquire additional digital products for use in their mobile devices, as such products become available.
Certain obstacles have thus far hindered the ability to make a wide range of digital products available to wireless subscribers. On computer networks such as the Internet, typically some computers act as servers, by providing information or services to other computers that act as the clients. Users can search for information and visit servers as they please, as long as the servers provide them with access. Each server is responsible for access control and what information it provides to whom; this is referred to as a “federated” model.
The opposite of a federated model is a so-called “walled garden” model. A network modeled after a walled garden enforces strict access control to content and information. Only the server, or servers, inside the “walls” can be accessed by users. External servers can only provide content if the content is submitted to servers inside the walls.
Service providers such as wireless Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are generally concerned with problems related to the kind of content delivered to the client devices using their networks. These problems include the following:                Quality concerns—The issue is whether the content is going to be properly consumed by the client device. If the quality is poor, the customer support issues will be costly.        Content delivery—Depending on device characteristics and content type, the delivery method to the client device may vary. Sophisticated delivery mechanisms are required to be in place with each server that intends to serve content to consumer devices.        Rights management—The issue is whether the owner of the content can be assured that only client devices with rights to the content can use the content.        Revenue—Providing content for download is a service that can be monetized (i.e., generate revenue/profit). The issue is how a CSP can ensure that the content that is downloaded is properly billed.        
Since the walled garden model offers strict control over available content, it addresses the foregoing problems. However, the walled garden model has its own set of problems, including:                Consumers are restricted to the services, content and information that are available in the walled garden. This restriction can be viewed as very undesirable, especially by a consumer group that is used to the Internet.        Scalability can become a problem when all consumers access a constrained resource, such as the limited number of servers available in the walled garden.        Service management becomes critical to the CSP. If the service does not provide a compelling user experience, service use and adoption will suffer. Many CSPs do not have core expertise in this field.        Lack of choice of name-brand content may result from poor content and supplier management by the CSP.        
Therefore, the basic problem becomes: How can a federated network of content servers be provided to consumers, without losing the ability to charge for content usage, manage digital rights, ensure content quality, and deliver content to client devices in a robust and secure way? Thus, it is desirable to have a solution for providing digital content to wireless devices which combines the strict control of a walled garden with the freedom provided by a federated model.